1. Description of Related Art
With the rise of microprocessor-based appliances and devices, software development has clearly become a significant business. In evaluating and supporting the appliances and devices, it may be beneficial to monitor exactly how events in the appliance and device occur and how the states are changing. An example of events is an action caused by user interaction with an appliance. It may be helpful for a software developer to know which commands a user uses most often and how long those commands take to execute. Such an analysis is often referred to as “profiling.” (Analogous analysis was performed on instructions in instruction sets to develop reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instructions.) [p2] Further, in designing devices with which a human interacts, it may be desirable to monitor how the user interacts with such a device. As an example, it may be desirable to monitor how a user utilizes a control panel of an image forming device such as a photocopier, facsimile machine, printer, scanner, an appliance such as a microwave oven, VCR, digital camera, cellular phone, palm top computer, etc.
Further, it may be desirable to monitor the state of the appliances and devices to provide diagnostics, services and maintenances. Some events may be caused by the internal changes within the appliances and devices. Some events may be caused by abnormal conditions such as paper jam in the copiers. Some error conditions and warning conditions may be caused by errors in the software installed in the target appliances and devices.
Further, users are increasingly utilizing the Internet. There is significant interest in how users use the Internet, particularly with respect to how users may use certain web pages. Monitoring a user's usage of the Internet may also become significant.
It may also be desirable to determine how a user is utilizing a certain application unit (e.g., a computer running a software application, a device with an interface to be operated by a user, or a web page). The user's usage of the application unit must be monitored and effectively communicated to a remote party.
2. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to a method and system that can monitor and communicate events at plural target applications of an application unit by using at least one Dynamic Linked Library (DLL) shared among the plural target applications. DLL supports multiple data formats and multiple protocols to communicated the event data. The application unit can specify at least one protocol to be used to report the information in at least one format from the application unit. Each of the at least one protocol and each of the at least one format can be defined through the interface function.